When documents are created, many decisions must be made as to style, content, layout, and the like. The text, images, and graphics must be organized and laid out in a two-dimensional format with the intention of providing a presentation to the viewer which will capture and preferably maintain their attention for the time sufficient to get the intended message across. Different style options are available for the various content elements and choices must be made. The best choices for style and layout depend upon content, intent, viewer interests, etc. In order to tell if a set of choices made as to the look and feel of the final version of the document were good or bad, one might request feedback from a set of viewers after viewing the document and compile the feedback into something meaningful from which the document's creators or developers can make alterations, changes, or other improvements. This cycle repeats until the document's owners are satisfied that the final version achieves the intended result.
This is method of designing a document may work well with a single, non-variable, document, but not it can be very labor intensive and/or time consuming to utilize such a process on a variable information documents.
Variable Information documents are documents that are personalized or tailored in some way to the particular user of the document. In traditional variable information applications, a graphic artist creates a template for the document, which describes the overall layout for the content items, the holes into which the variable content should be placed, and rules for how to fill in the variable slots with the content, or links to particular fields in a database. The variable data application then creates a document for each customer by inserting the data for the customer into its linked slot. The resulting set of documents can contain instances which don't work well with the designed template's desired quality and/or effectiveness.
Factors that contribute to the quality and effectiveness of a document are the document's layout and style. Conventionally, these factors have been measured using subjective measures, thereby adding to the labor and time needed to fully evaluate a document.
This may not be a significant problem when evaluating a production run of a non-variable content document because an evaluator needs only to look at a sample or proof to make a determination if the non-variable content documents, generated by the production run, will have the desired quality and effectiveness. However, if the need is to evaluate a production run of variable content documents, an evaluator would need to look at all the variable content documents on an individual basis because although each document may have started with a common template, the inclusion of the variable content into the documents makes each document unique. By requiring an evaluator to review each individual document to determine effectiveness and quality, one could not ever have an effective quality control process with respect to production runs of variable content documents.
Therefore, it is desirable to measure a document's effectiveness and quality without relying upon an evaluator subjective evaluation. Moreover, it is desirable to provide a methodology to measure the quality of a document in a quantifiable way. It is also desirable to provide iterative quantifiable measurements of quality which are useable in evaluating an individual document and making individual document decisions.
A method for adjusting a layout of a document to alter the quality of the document, the quality of the document being a quantized measurement of parameters generates a base document with a plurality of blocks, each block having a plurality of document parameters associated therewith; generates a base quantized quality score for the base document based upon the parameters of the base document; modifies the parameters of the base document and generating a quantized quality score for the document based upon the modified parameters of the base document; compares the quantized quality score with the base quantized quality score; changes the base quantized quality score to equal the quantized quality score and the parameters of the document to equal the modifications when the quantized quality score is closer to a preferred quantized quality score than the base quantized quality score; and continues changing (e.g. incrementing and/or decrementing), and comparing until the quantized quality score is equal to the preferred quantized quality score.
A method for adjusting a layout of a document to alter the quality of the document, the quality of the document being a quantized measurement of parameters generates a base document with a plurality of blocks, each block having a plurality of document parameters associated therewith; generates a base quantized quality score for the base document based upon the parameters of the base document; changes the parameters of the document and generating a first quantized quality score for the document based upon the changed parameters of the document; compares the first quantized quality score with the base quantized quality score; changes the bench quantized quality score to equal the first quantized quality score and the parameters of the document to equal the changes when the first quantized quality score is closer to a preferred quantized quality score than the base quantized quality score; displays the changed document; determines if a user has accepted the changed document; and continues incrementing, decrementing, comparing, and displaying until a user has accepted the changed document.
A method for adjusting a layout of a document to alter the quality of the document, the quality of the document being a quantized measurement of parameters generates a base document with a plurality of blocks, each block having a plurality of document parameters associated therewith; manually, by a user, changes the parameters of the base document; generates a base quantized quality score for the manually changed base document; changes, automatically, the parameters of the document and generating a first quantized quality score for the document based upon the changed parameters of the document; compares the first quantized quality score with the base quantized quality score; changes the base quantized quality score to equal the first quantized quality score and the parameters of the document to equal the changes when the first quantized quality score is closer to a preferred quantized quality score than the base quantized quality score; displays the changed document; determines if a user has accepted the changed document; and continues incrementing, decrementing, comparing, and displaying until the user has accepted the changed document.